During vehicle transportation/movements routinely experienced in dealership environments, vehicular entities are typically subjected to or involved in unpredictable and location altering movements due to activities engaging associated personnel and/or clients. Similarly, in warehouse environments, various entities, such as containers, are often moved between a starting location and a future location, with some uncertainty arising regarding the path taken between these two locations and the future location. As more users, personnel employees or clients are involved in the movements of these mobile or movable entities, the likelihood of a movable entity being misplaced or removed from the corresponding environment increases. So, typical issues relating to on-demand locating of these movable entities increase with the size of the environment and/or the number of movable entities involved.
These environments have typically used inefficient tools or approaches for tracking these movable entities, such as bar-coded labels and/or magnetic stripe tags and documents such as bills of lading and manifests and/or paper labels, which have lead to wasteful management assets and increase in overall operation costs. These tracking approaches typically do not track substantially continuously these movable entities along paths of a process or operation without human intervention. Moreover, these tracking approaches require bringing or providing suitable readers to these bar-coded labeled or magnetically tagged entities to ensure logging of the proper locations of these entities.
Electronic tracking and/or positioning devices or tags are utilized to overcome these cumbersome disadvantages associated with these conventional tracking approaches. These tags may use either radio frequency identification (RFID) or global positioning system (GPS) technologies. Applications of RFID technology are wide ranging and involve detection of tagged entities as they pass or are stationed near a RFID sensor or reader via unique identification of specific tags associated with these entities, and storing data relating to the tags into the RFID reader or alternate data storage for later recovery. Applications of GPS technology involve determining a position of a GPS receiver or entity by measuring the distance between itself and three or more GPS satellites. Measuring the time delay between transmission and reception of each GPS radio signal gives the distance to each GPS satellite, since the signal travels at a known speed. The signals also carry information about the satellites' location. By determining the position of, and distance to, at least three satellites, the receiver can compute its position using trilateration or triangulation. Receivers typically do not have perfectly accurate clocks and therefore track one or more additional satellites to correct the receiver's clock error.
These RFID and GPS electronic tracking technologies can be useful tools in well-known techniques of productivity improvements of process or operations. With today's emphasis on “lean implementation” in business environments, manufacturing and service, companies seek to acquire tools that effectively identify problems affecting productivity and update work-in-progress operation flows with newly inserted tasks. A basic philosophy of the lean implementation into an operation flow is to target inefficiency and to improve economical goals, which is accomplished by focusing on determining production times that meet or exceed customer requirements. Initiatives of lean implementations typically begin with a development of a value stream map of an operation. However, the value stream map does not take into consideration a dynamic aspect of the operation and a product mix that may be in production at different times.
Six Sigma is a method, based on standard deviations, used to analyze and identify variations in operation flows to provide productivity improvements. As such, some companies have integrated aspects of the six-sigma and lean tools to improve productivity in the manufacturing and service environments. However, when process or operation map studies and forecasting simulations are required due to changes in operation constraints, further off-line actions have to be undertaken such as building, verifying and validating simulation models for experimentation of improvements. These actions thus lack a dynamic aspect of integrations or modifications in model simulations.
Accordingly, a system and method is desired that can integrate and combine electronic tracking technologies with varied analytical and implementation tools to dynamically track entities involved in operations so as to simulate and analyze these operations while subjected to any applicable conditions and scenarios to provide productivity improvements.